It's Apple day, again

Here we go again, dancing to Apple's tune. The ritual is that we wildly speculate all day about what will be revealed at tonight's not-live-but-beamed-across-from-California press conference, and eventually Steve Jobs will appear in the form of a technology deity from the future to drop some white/aluminum cool product bombshell.
11:24 We're expecting a new iPod that'll be much like the iPhone: widescreen, touch-screen and wireless. There have also been rumours of some kind of digital radio function, although that does rather go against Apple's iPod strategy to date. Bobbie Johnson & I will be trekking to BBC TV Centre via camel this afternoon, so you don't have to.
Watch this space for updates...

Here we go again, dancing to Apple's tune. The ritual is that we wildly speculate all day about what will be revealed at tonight's not-live-but-beamed-across-from-California-at-6pm press conference, and eventually Steve Jobs will appear in the form of a technology deity from the future to drop some white/aluminum cool product bombshell.

Scroll down for updates...

11:24 We're expecting a new iPod that'll be much like the iPhone: widescreen, touch-screen and wireless. There have also been reports of some kind of digital radio function and music-buying feature, which would be quite a departure. Bobbie Johnson and I will be trekking to BBC TV Centre via camel this afternoon, so you don't have to.

17:38 We made it, via the central line, in twenty minutes. RIP, the Tube strike. So to set the scene, this is Studio 1 at BBC TV Centre and a couple of hundred journalists, retailers, industry analysts from across Europe (few of them women, I feel duty bound to point out) are fidgeting impatiently in thirty or so rows of itchy red woolly seats.

We're being treated to music by Editors and Amy Winehouse, and a cheesy graphic on the Golden Gate bridge next to a red phone box is hovering next to a couple of large, glowing white apples somewhere in the distance. At least I think those are apples. They might be some kind of religious symbol, but then I haven't been to the optician in a while.

The beat - we have been told by Apple - goes on. Hopefully they are about to tell us exactly what that means.

17:57 Now we can see a live feed of all our colleagues at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. How quaint.

Bobbie spots YouTube's Chad Hurley and Google's Marissa Meyer in the crowd - what does this mean?! Are they just nosey, or does this have some greater significance? The lights are going down...

And then I grabbed his head like this and said "this, Bill, is the future of music..."

He starts off on safe ground: iTunes is dominating the market and now has 6m songs, 550 TV shows (with 95m individual episodes downloaded) and 125,000 podcasts.

Perhaps more of an indication of the influence of Apple, he says, is that 32% of 2006 US music release were only released digitally.

"Look how far we've come, That gives you a feel for how far we've come in the last few years in this music revolution.

"There will be a new version of iTunes tonight, the bigger feature of which will be ringtones."

That's Apple moving into a lucrative mobile sub-sector.

The standard cost of a ringtone is $2.49 - Apple will do them for 99c on top of the cost of the song. So that's $1.98.

It's a custom ringtone maker built into Tunes, that can then be synced to on the iPhone. Steve demos how you'll be able to use iTunes to hack your chosen track into a a snippet for a ringtone, choosing Aretha Franklin's Respect - "for when my wife calls", he jokes. Oh Steve.

All very well Steve, but we don't have iPhones yet. So what about iPods?

18:24: Every iPod, overhauled Apple has sold 110m iPods to date and the sales curve is the strongest at Christmas, so today "we're going to refresh or replace every product in this line in time for holiday season", says Big Jobs.

The Nano, he says, is the best-seling music player of all time. So what are they doing to it?

Apple is making it much smaller, much slimmer and aluminium. The screen is bigger , at 2", and still smaller than the current 2.5" video ipod screen. But this iPod, according to his sales blurb has the highest-ever pixel density of an Apple product yet. So though the screen is smaller, the picture quality is as good. Work that out.

The new iPod Nano, complete with greasy finger prints

The battery life is better - 24hours of audio and 5 hours or video playback, and it comes in 4GB and 8GB for $149 and $199. Twice the memory for the same price. Cue even more (slightly sinister and cultish) cheering.

And now we're being treated to a Nano video ad with Feist soundtrack, on TV near you soon.

Now what?

18:30: Full metal iPod jacket The original iPods get a name - the iPod Classic. And an overhaul, in a full metal design with an 80GB or whopping 160G version.

"This boggles the mind. When we started five years ago we put a thousand songs in your pocket - this puts 40,000 songs in your pocket."

The steely dark grey iPod Classic

The price will be $249 and $349. (I'll get all the UK prices later.)

There's more...

18:38: The iPod Touch! Here's the money shot, finally.

"When we introduced the iPhone we said it was the best iPod ever. And it is. People have been asking when we bring this technology to an iPod. And this is it."

"It's the seventh wonder of the world."

It's the iPhone without the phone bits.

The iPod Touch: the iPhone, without the phone bits

It looks exactly like the iPhone, with the same coverflow touchscreen to flick through iTunes and through album artwork, and the same through photos.

Really need photos of this... I'll get you some soon! He's plays a bit of Dylan, a few seconds of a movie clip with John Trevolting and flicks through some photos. Yep, it's fast and slick and does that clever screen-rotates-with-the-handset thing, but we've seen all that on the iPhone. Anything else?

Wait a minute - what's that in the corner? It's an antenna, for wifi.

Some have tried this and failed. So why will Apple succeed?

Too many public wifi networks are over-complicated, asking for logic pages. To get round that, the iPod Touch will have the Safari web browser built in so that users can log in to the network. And it's the best web browser on any mobile device he says, but then he would. Google and Yahoo search are built in, as is a YouTube application - as on the iPhone. And it's 8mm thin.

It'll be the first touchscreen device that Apple has shipped globally. Well yes, of course.

Oh, and would there be one more thing perhaps, Steve?

You get the sense he's done this a few times.

18:48: iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store It's a mini version of the iTunes store that you can use, from the iPod, by searching for specific artists or scanning top tens. The next time you dock your iPod to your computer it syncs back up to iTunes and joins your main library. It'll be in the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch.

So that's pretty much all as we expected, though not a whiff of all that radio talk. We suspect that might be some new part of the iPod "ecosystem" as they say - a base station with digital radio capability or something. I can't imagine Steve getting all that excited about that though.

18:59: And now a word from our sponsors We then entered a realm dangerously near the ridiculous when Steve Jobs started saying how great Starbucks is. People around me got up and started to leave - even Bobbie, though he insists that was for a phone call. The shoddy excuse for tacking on some puff from the Starbucks chief executive was an iPod Touch Starbucks application.

I kid you not.

I'm off to fiddle with the gadgets and make those touchscreens as greasy as possible on your behalf. More soon...

19:08: Hang on! iPhone price slashed Their feedback says Apple iPhone users are more satisfied with their products than any other Apple product. So Steve's last trick is to cut the price of the top iPhone - the 8GB version - from $599 to $299. He's halved the price.

"We want to put iPhones in a lot of stockings this Christmas."

That bodes well for us European types. Hurrah!

19:20: KT Tunstall does a turn We got a couple of songs, and then she said: "As a musician, Steve Jobs is actually making it more fun to pay for music than steal it, and that's great."

Cheque's in the post, right love?

21:07 After the euphoria Right. OK. So we got what we expected: an iPhone-like iPod with wifi and a music store. And new versions of the Nano and Classic.

UK prices have been confirmed as £99 and £129 for the 4GB and 8GB Nano, and £159 and £229 for the 80GB and 160GB iPod Classic.

And if you're sold on the iPod Touch, that will set you back £199 for the 8GB and £269 for the 16GB. Unless you happen to be popping over to the US anytime soon...